This specification relates to advertising.
Advertisers often have multiple advertising channels through which they can conduct an advertising campaign such as through television, radio, print and online media. How an advertiser apportions the adverting budget among the various advertising channels often affects the advertiser's return-on-investment. For example, a higher return-on-investment for an advertised product may be realized when an advertiser spends, respectively, 20%, 40% and 40% of the advertising budget on television, print and online media advertising as compared to spending, respectively, 30%, 20% and 50% of the advertising budget on television, print and online media advertising.
One approach to determining how the advertising budget should be apportioned relies on examining past advertising budget apportionments and the corresponding performance of the advertising campaigns, and using this information to predict how the budget should be apportioned for future campaigns to realize a desired result. However past apportionments and performances may not always be relevant to the advertiser's current advertising strategies. For example, an advertiser may want to employ an advertising channel that the advertiser has not used in the recent past (or at all) and thus no historical information for the channel is available.
Further, as the performance of a campaign is closely coupled to the type of product/service and the advertising channels used, there may not be historical information available for new products/services.